Eugene McCartan was worried. There was water running into his old Temple Bar shop, and the upstairs floors had been colonised by pigeons. The bank wouldn’t give him any money. He needed a partnership with a builder, but none of those he spoke to were interested.

One day in 2003, McCartan was walking over the Millennium Bridge when his eye was caught by a large banner draped over the side of a scaffold on Lower Ormond Quay. “No to War. No to Nice. No to American Terrorism”, it said, and it bore the logo of builder Mick Wallace. That, thought McCartan, might be a builder we could work with.

Over three years later, the Communist Party of Ireland, and its bookshop, Connolly Books, have a spanking new premises at Connolly House, 43 East Essex St, and Mick Wallace has six apartments, above and out the back.

“I wasn’t doing it for nothing”, Wallace emphasises, over a rushed espresso in a coffee shop on Bloom Lane, the Italian street he built on Lower Ormond Quay. “I’ll make a few bob out of it”, he says, “but it was a nightmare of a build”.

The building dates from the 17th century, and is listed. The site out the back is small – “you couldn’t swing a cat in it” – and it straddles the Poddle, Dublin’s underground river, which meant archaeological surveys and further restrictions on the building. The Council imposed 15 pages of conditions, says McCartan.

The Party now has a basement archive space, a new shop, a purpose-built theatre – leased to the New Theatre company – out the back, and swish office space upstairs.

It’s all a far cry from the first Connolly House, which was across the river on Great Strand St, where the Revolutionary Workers’ Group opened a socialist bookshop in 1932.

In March 1933, the building was attacked by a mob that had marched from the Pro-Cathedral. Bob Doyle was at the Pro-Cathedral that evening, for a Lenten mission. He remembers the Jesuit preacher saying, “Here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these vile Communist creatures are within our midst”. After the sermon, a crowd of about a thousand gathered outside, singing ‘To Jesus Heart All Burning’, and marched to Connolly House. (Doyle describes the event in his memoir, Brigadista, An Irishman’s Fight Against Fascism.) “We were told that they were spitting on a statue of the Blessed Virgin inside”, Doyle recalls.

The “siege” lasted three days. It ended when burning wood was pushed through the letterbox and the building took fire. Those inside escaped across the rooftops.

The Connolly House burning sparked Bob Doyle’s interest in the communists. He joined, and soon found himself involved in “daily battles with the Blueshirts and the Animal Gang in O’Connell St”. The Animal Gang were a notorious anti-communist gang who used to break up left-wing meetings and attack premises. They were “toughs, and used bicycle chains”, recalls Doyle. There were other arson attacks, including one on Mrs Barrett’s grocery shop on Parnell St, which sold left wing pamphlets.

Joe Deasy, now in his 80s, was a Labour councillor in the early 1940s (where he sat on the housing committee with “Big Jim” Larkin) who left Labour and became a communist. In the late 1940s, he got involved in setting up a co-op in Ballyfermot, then a new housing development with almost no facilities. Initially successful, the co-op was denounced from the altar at the local parish church as a front for communists. A picket ensued, and Deasy and three other communists on the co-op committee resigned, hoping the picket would be called off. It wasn’t. The co-op collapsed.

“Dublin could claim that it was the most venomous anti-left city in Europe”, says Deasy, sitting in his home in Crumlin, under the gaze of a print of James Connolly.

Why such venom? He leans forward. “To put it tersely, Communism was ‘anti-God’.”

One of the leading Irish communists was Mick O’Riordan, who ran for election to the Dail in 1961, in Dublin South West. He was denounced by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who issued a pastoral letter saying it would be a mortal sin to vote for “the red O’Riordan”. O’Riordan polled 295 votes. Walking down Grafton St one day afterwards, he passed Brendan Behan, who shouted at him, “Congratulations Mick, on the 295 mortalers”.

Mick O’Reilly, now secretary of the ATGWU, tried to join the communists in 1962, aged 16. “We’ve been accused of a lot, son” he was told by Johnny Nolan, the national organiser, “and I don’t want to add kidnapping. So when you grow up, come back”. O’Reilly did come back, three years later.

By then, the party had acquired a new premises, at 16A Pearse St, with a bookshop, New Books, where it survived (despite one attack, in 1956, provoked by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution) until 1971.

“It was a wonderful place to get your education”, says O’Reilly, “to read books collectively and to argue out their philosophical and political consequences.” The reading was diverse, he says, across the left-wing spectrum, from Connolly and Marx to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle.

One of the attractions for active party members was the prospect of getting a free trip to a Soviet Union holiday resort. Eoin O’Murchu, now political correspondent for Radio na Gaeltachta, once slept in a bed that had been slept in by Stalin, in a villa at the Sorchi resort on the Black Sea, on a trip in the 1980s. Alas, drink had been banned from all Communist Party hotels under Mikhail Gorbachev’s no-alcohol policy, so the holiday was rather dull, O’Murchu says.

Mick O’Reilly went on one sponsored trip to the Soviet Union, in 1970 (he left the party a few years later). “You saw what they wanted you to see, tractor factories, workers’ meetings.” But it wasn’t as controlled as he’d expected. He remembers the group’s translator talking to him about the one-party state, and saying, “where do you think all the opportunists go when there’s only one party?”

In Ireland, Party members were watched by the Special Branch. “All your post was read. There’d be Special Branch people outside the door”, says O’Reilly. The Branch would visit Party members’ bosses, or where young people were suspected of getting involved, their parents. One job O’Reilly applied for, he received the reply, “We do not require your services now, or ever. Thank you”. He attributes that to a Special Branch visit to the potential employer.

O’Murchu recalls that when one of the Special Branch members regularly assigned to watch the Communist Party members retired, “some of the lads got together and bought him a present and gave it to him in the Norseman”. (Both the communists and the Branch used drink in the Norseman, apparently.) The Branch officer was delighted. The communist irony went over his head: the present was a book by Maksim Gorki, ‘The Life of a Useless Man’, about the life of a police spy.

There was a variety of socialist literature in English available to the Party: the classic key of Marx, Engels and Lenin from Russia, complete collections of Lenin’s pamphlets from China, and a broad range of history and fiction from the Left Book Club in Britain, published in distinctive orange-covered paperbacks – Eugene McCartan has boxes of them still in his basement.

The bookshop today has a much broader collection, in part angled towards the Temple Bar tourists who wander in. There are coffee-table books of Irish photos and the standard works of Irish history and literature, with a good measure of more radical, and republican, literature sprinkled amongst them, including a good collection of James Connolly’s works, which they have kept in print. The shop is particularly strong on the Spanish Civil War and Latin America.

And there is a small, eccentric secondhand selection including, for €3.50, a 1968 paperback, Coup d’Etat. A Practical Handbook – A Brilliant Guide To Taking Over a Nation. (The book ends with some salutary advice for wielding power in the immediate aftermath of the successful coup: “our position will be vulnerable to many threats – including that of coup d’etat”.) Beside it is a rather more subtle account of leveraging power, Garret FitzGerald’s autobiography, A Life, though it is more expensive.

This article was originally published in Village magazine, March 2007.